Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Dupple writes with this excerpt: "It has become an increasingly large problem that Visa, MasterCard, and Paypal control the valve to any money flow on the planet. Today, the European Parliament established this as a clear problem, and initiated regulation of the companies, limiting and strictly regulating their right to refuse service. The Pirate Party was the initiator of this regulation, following the damaging cutoff of donations to WikiLeaks, after said organization had performed journalism that was embarrassing to certain governments."

While I like regulation in many cases, like nuclear power plants, in my experience new regulations are like cables.

When you put all the cables on the floor, they're more likely to snag your legs, or get entangled and knotted with each other.

This is why sometimes the solution is fewer regulations, and more direct solutions. If relatively few companies control our banking or money flow, the solution may be to break up some large companies.

I think the feds are about to do this to Google for their near-total-dominance of search results and search-based advertising. Too much power in one set of hands can be destructive, unless that set of hands truly does "do no evil."

If you throw cables on the floor for any reason, or string them at random heights or intervals to please one particular person, yes - they can bring all progress to a halt.

Properly planned and distributed, however, they can take a seemingly impossible task - such as spanning a large body of water, capturing a large number of fish, jumping out of an airplane from several thousand feet up and landing safely, or climbing a very tall structure - and make it a straightforward task.

The only difference between gridlock and utility is the thought and care with which the regulations are laid.

This is why sometimes the solution is fewer regulations, and more direct solutions.

Somebody has to be the first to mention bitcoin, so I guess it will be me...Though it might not be the be-all-end-all at least it does solve the abuses of power that can come from governments trying to stop the flow of money between people who actually do want to send money from one person to another.

"Though it might not be the be-all-end-all at least it does solve the abuses of power that can come from governments trying to stop the flow of money between people who actually do want to send money from one person to another."

This is precisely why cash must be preserved at all costs. If money transfer ever becomes exclusively electronic, you will be owned.

regulation is a necessary evil. The financial meltdown under bush/cheney was mostly a result of conservatives removing banking regulations and banks gambling with money they use to not be able to. Even Alan Greenspan commented he thought banks would show some restraint out of self preservation, but he was wrong.

I like this, personally; I feel that 'too big to (be allowed to) fail' equates directly to 'too big to be left as a time bomb' and getting bailed out should include getting broken up. But then again I feel that one of the great periods in consumer choice on the internet was when those who owned the wires were forced to allow anyone to use the wires who wanted to (at a reasonable rate), and that it would be lovely to go back to that. (Or better yet, just break up into a wire-owning company, a content-generation company, and a data-shovelling company.)

It might not be a bad idea if government bail-outs worked as share dilution (based on the value of shares at the moment the paperwork was filed). The shares could then be used either as a source of revenue once the company was up and running again or to promote the national interest in some other way (by, for example, on-shoring jobs, or transferring the shares to one of the administrative departments to treat as effectively a nationalised company).

I am not even sure we could break up a transnational like Visa or Mastercard. Who has authority over them? The best a country can do is say 'if you want to do business in our borders, you must follow XYZ rules'.

"I am not even sure we could break up a transnational like Visa or Mastercard. Who has authority over them? The best a country can do is say 'if you want to do business in our borders, you must follow XYZ rules'."

Easy. Designate them as banks. Then they can be regulated.

That should have been done to PayPal long ago, and already has been done in Europe.

Usually the way companies like that work is by having wholly-owned subsidiaries in each country (or regulatory area - so just one in the EU, for example), each of which complies with national laws about who they can do business with (i.e. can they handle payments for prostitutes, can they do business with Cuba, etc.), and employs their local staff, but then outsources actual operations to other subsidiaries which own the big iron and do the core business work, then the whole lot is connected together with m

Oh Americans... will you ever realize, that regulation is when you get to say "No! Stop it! We won't have it like this! Now it's my rules!"

Which is your only damn defense against those 20-page terms & conditions contracts.

Why the hell you would complain about such regulation, that does you good, and instead choose to defend the companies, that get to do way too much already, so they can do even more evil shit, is a riddle to us non-Americans.

It's like a rape victim complaining that his savior should not tell his rapist what to do so much.

Then again, in North Korea, they really believe that if you touch an American flag, your hands will rot off. As if that would really actually happen...

So I guess people can be brainwashed into almost any delusion... even that their rapist would be the one that needs "more freedom"... and protecting your own rights would be "harming the free market".

They are conditioned to believe this shit at early ages... "If you want to be rich some day, you have to think this way and support Free Market Capitalism. Anything else is just bad, and you don't need to know any more about it. Let's just call it all Socialism. It kind of rhymes with Satan, well, it starts with the same letter, at least."

This is why you have stupid people, who haven't a pot to piss in, that lobby against things that are in their own interests, in favour of the corporate greed.

Ordinary workers, living from paycheck to paycheck, getting in debt, saying that at least under (Insert Republican candidate they've been conditioned to support) they get to "keep what they have". No sir, they don't want anything like subsidized health care, they'd rather go into mortal debt for an emergency appendectomy. At least they are living the American Dream and doing it on their own, because government handouts are Socialism, which is the same as Communism (See, the old U.S.S.R. had the word "Socialist" in the title)

Now these big companies, whose "freedom" they worship, are wanting to claw back their meager wages and benefits while execs get bonuses. Damn those unions for interfering with the God Given Rights of the corporations.

Of course not all Americans are this obtuse, it's just that they are also taught to be very vocal when others don't agree with their beliefs, or criticize their country.

"They are conditioned to believe this shit at early ages... "If you want to be rich some day, you have to think this way and support Free Market Capitalism. Anything else is just bad, and you don't need to know any more about it. Let's just call it all Socialism. It kind of rhymes with Satan, well, it starts with the same letter, at least.""

The issue raised by GP has absolutely nothing to do with "free market capitalism". You are echoing precisely the kind of delusion to which he referred, just in the other direction.

"Capitalism" is a means of financing production. And from its very inception (you have obviously not read your Adam Smith, which you really should do before expounding on this issue), it has acknowledged that some regulation would be necessary to keep markets free. In the form of anti-trust, which is a term Smith did not use hi

Like Obama being a non-US citizen mulisum. Or like Jesus coming to the Ozarks, or Jesus in general for that matter. Or that totally giving the super rich more money will like totally make them spend more money, which will somehow help the poor people. Or that like Evolution isn't like a thing. Or like ya man, less regulation of our finicinal markets it so the way to go, the invisible hand of captiolism is totaly rad. Or a thousand other things...

The two aren't completely contradictory: it is a bit like saying that the tax code should be simplified by the total tax rate increased, so that you've got less (and simpler) taxes but more total tax.

The problem is that too many people confuse "simple" with "permissive" when it comes to regulation. The former is clearly a good thing, within reason, but the latter is problematic. Unfortunately, those benefiting most from regulatory capture argue for permissiveness in the name of simplicity while arguing aga

The analogy is problematic but promising. You like regulations in some cases (power plants) but presumably not others. However you are stating the problem is with the number of regulations, rather than how and where they are applied. If your analogy shifted to "rather than all the cables in an unorganized mess on the floor, you organize them so people don't trip". Essentially, you make it simple to follow the rules and comply for anyone within their domain of expertise, and not such a horrible mess you need

That's a horrible analogy. Your solution would imply we should remove all the *cables*(hindrances) from the floor, but that would deprive us of the benefit those *cables*(resources) were to provide! (see the paradox?)

A better analogy would be deceleration mechanisms on roads; improperly designed and placed speed bumps are a *major* annoyance, but the solution is NOT to eliminate them all together; since they are also what stop a speeding car from killing a silly kid crossing the road.

That's why we have mechanisms in place designed to hand over the power in the government as painlessly as possible on a regular basis. It's called democracy. A good measure of democracy is the inverse of the amount of force needed to replace the persons in power. Democracy is stronger, if the force needed is less.

involved in the US electoral process. But I wouldn't say that fact indicates that we have a "strong democracy" here.

Brute force has been replaced with the strategic application of cubic shitloads of MONEY. If anything, such a situation is a hell of a lot LESS democratic than mob rule would be. Just about anybody could scrape together some guns and enough people to try to take out undesirable politicians by force if that's the way they want to go about it, but only elite moneyed interests are able to mount

...how it is that banks can control the abstract tool used for easing trade......

So I want to trade you for something you have but I don't have what you want so we used this abstract tool to allow you to then get what you want from some one else.But we cannot even do that because some bank which originated in the support of the basic idea of this abstract tool decides they don;t want to?

They are contradicting the purpose of the abstract tool of money. They are contradicting their own original objective.

Noone is stopping you from using your money to buy something from another person

This argument is complete and utter horseshit. If I cannot transfer money, they are in fact stopping me from doing it. No bank or credit card agency should be allowed to prevent me from making a lawful transfer without good reason. And "I don't like what that organization is doing" is NOT a good reason. Not when you have entrenched yourself so deeply in the global financial infrastructure.

They're not preventing you from transferring funds, they're refusing to let it happen through their service.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from taking out a bank draft or a money order, or a certified cheque, or a regular cheque, or going to Western Union, or from mailing cash, or from using any of the many other methods available to move money from one point to another. They have every right to refuse to let the transaction pass through their electronic network.

"They have every right to refuse to let the transaction pass through their electronic network."

Do they? Really?

So, then, I have the right to hire or fire anyone I want, for any reason? Including skin color? Or allow (or disallow) them into the college I administrate? Well, the latter is not (usually) a private business so let's let that one aside. Still, you're saying that in my TV sales business (let's say) I can hire only the hot guys who are willing to eat ME for lunch? Or refuse to sell something to someone from Puerto Rico?

The EU has a terrible track record when it comes to stuff like this. SWIFT was the only major payment network that was a European company and the US Treasury completely compromised it by seizing their US datacenter. So they built another datacenter in Europe so they could have multi-homed operations without exposure to the USA and whilst construction was being done, the US put huge pressure on the bureaucrats who then rolled over and said, sure, you can have all the data you want from SWIFT. So if the EU parliament really wants payment networks to stop doing things because the US wouldn't like it, the first step is to cut off the US Treasuries unilateral access to SWIFT data. But they won't.

According to WikiLeaks own site (link above), my United States government has no law against giving them money. Some US-based banks are acting on their own.

European finance should not depend on US privates companies, i.e. banks, to provide electronic payments. Where are the French and German based credit card companies? Surely, Switzerland can manage to create one.

Joke of the decade. It's in banks' interests to process as many transactions as possible. They'd refuse service only if (a) the service will cause them harm or (b) someone is forcing their hand. I don't see how revealing government's secret deals harms banks.

You can just clone a corporation by cutting it into two independent pieces. Like a zombie, but eating money instead of brains. And regenerating all the missing parts instantly after cutting it in two. With the right shell structure, you can usually avoid those problems long enough to get new laws written - like waiting around for the food and ammo to run out on your human victims. With enough lawyers, corporations can just hang out until the conditions are right for consolidation of resources. And a feast of brains.

Nope. Not what's happening at all. They're simply saying that a credit card company cannot deny your transaction just because they don't like who the money is going to.

I don't give a flying fuck how "private" the banks/CCs are. They have deeply entrenched themselves in our financial infrastructure. Doing so means they have obligated themselves certain responsibilities. There is absolutely no valid reason whatsoever that Visa should be able to tell me who I can and cannot transfer money to. Even if it is usi

The MEP, Christian Engström", who instigated this is being disengenous when he claims the problem he is fighting is "American fundamentalist moralism". If you RTFA you find out that it was Swedish banks denying purchases of "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys" and trying to shove blame off on "vague rules from Visa and Mastercard". Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal allow purchases of these items every day the world over. He should instead be blaming Swedish fundamentalist moralism. This strikes me as nothing more than another European statist power grab against an American company. If the Europeans want in on the payment processing business then they should create a competing company, not use big government to attempt to seize power over American companies.

While it is true that Visa blocked donations to Wikileaks and I agree that it was likely done at the request of the U.S. government I do not think the answer is more government. If people are afraid that the blocking of Wikileaks is just the tip of the iceberg then it provides a market opportunity for another card processing company to form outside of the U.S. I would prefer to see that happen than the Europeans decide that they can tell a private sector business that they must provide service. One reaso

While it is true that Visa blocked donations to Wikileaks and I agree that it was likely done at the request of the U.S. government I do not think the answer is more government.

That's too bad, as there are no other viable alternatives.

If people are afraid that the blocking of Wikileaks is just the tip of the iceberg then it provides a market opportunity for another card processing company to form outside of the U.S.

You people keep saying that, and yet it NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS. Besides, I don't want to have to worry about which payment processor will accept which payments. They should not have the right to deny me the service.

I would prefer to see that happen than the Europeans decide that they can tell a private sector business that they must provide service

And I would far, far, far rather see it happen that a company can entrench itself in the global financial infrastructure and make it obscenely difficult to do business without them cannot arbitrarily decide what they will and will not allow

While it is true that Visa blocked donations to Wikileaks and I agree that it was likely done at the request of the U.S. government I do not think the answer is more government.

That's too bad, as there are no other viable alternatives.

[..]

Process Wikileaks transactions.

In this context, the credit card payment processors are in a similar position to SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), who process most international wire transfers. SWIFT is a company based in Belgium, and because of sanctions imposed by the EU, is unable to process transactions involving most Iranian banks.(Since this ban, Turkey has been buying Iranian oil with physical gold.)

SWIFT saying "The EU told us not to do deal with Iran" is the same as Visa saying "The US told

If you RTFA you find out that it was Swedish banks denying purchases of "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys" and trying to shove blame off on "vague rules from Visa and Mastercard".

Oddly enough, contemporary Swedish fundamentalist moralism doesn't seem to include problems with "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys". It may have a real problem with wikileaks, though, comparable to the problem the U.S. (and UK, and, and...) governments have with wikileaks.

Visa and Mastercard have a significant problem with displeasing governments: if you don't forbid them acting in concert to please their home governments, your country gets whatever the U.S wants (as discussed in several other threads in this discussion).

Can you back that up with something more substantial? I found this in depth article [wordpress.com] and it paints a very muddy picture. PayPal suspended their account and then re-activated it again, but that sort of thing is par for the course with them. The banks that were interviewed all seemed to say either, "decisions are made by local branches, we don't control it" or "VISA and Mastercard forbid businesses selling obscene things" (ok) but also that the banks have ethical policies and may "refuse to engage if it would

If the Europeans want in on the payment processing business then they should create a competing company, not use big government to attempt to seize power over American companies.

Europeans can't seize power over American companies due to not having physical capacity to do so. On the other hand, Europeans can seize power over the portions of international corporations that operate within EU. And why shouldn't they? "Big government" is not a boogeyman in Europe, so appeals to it are not a sufficient reason.

Just saying, this is THE reason they were invented. You can get money to anyone in the world in approx 10 minutes without any oversight of blocking or interception or BS like Paypal and the big CCs try to pull.

I understand it is just a report, which does not means it will become a UE directive. Remember the UE parliament is not a real parliament: it cannot initiate the legislative process. They will have to convince the European Commission to start a directive draft, and the Commission can just ignore them (and there are precedents).

IMO nothing will happen. UE has nothing to do with a democracy where member of parliament have some power.

Wish I had points to mod this comment up. The fact is that newspapers always have been and always will be a means for the parties that control them to tell people what to think. Any real news, not to mention comics, puzzles, and horoscopes have always been a secondary concern meant to make the rest seem more legit and sell papers. But for some reason most people really don't get it. News outlets aren't thinking how can we report better. They are thinking how can we sell our services to more people so we can

At that point I wasn't referring to political parties at all. Maybe I should of said the principals who control them or simple the people who control them. I see how I later went on to mention right leaning or left leaning groups so that might of seem implied. Many grass roots organizations put out their own newsletter/etc so your point is well taken. But most main stream news outlets have bigger backers.

The irony is that it was a "true journalist" that accidentally leaked the encryption key to the WikiLeaks archive with the embassy cables. WikiLeaks up to that point seemed to know their limitations and was working with established journalists to release the cables in a controlled fashion.